Last year a government commission called for the US to adopt
an AI-driven mass surveillance system far beyond that used in any other
country. Now, many of the “obstacles” cited as preventing its implementation
are being removed under the guise of combating coronavirus.
April 21st, 2020
April 21st, 2020
By Whitney Webb, MPN.news.
WASHINGTON DC (The Last American Vagabond) — Last year, a
U.S. government body dedicated to examining how artificial intelligence can
“address the national security and defense needs of the United States”
discussed in detail the “structural” changes that the American economy and
society must undergo in order to ensure a technological advantage over China,
according to a recent document acquired through an FOIA request. This document
suggests that the U.S. follow China’s lead and even surpass them in many
aspects related to AI-driven technologies, particularly their use of mass
surveillance. This perspective clearly clashes with the public rhetoric of
prominent U.S. government officials and politicians on China, who have labeled
the Chinese government’s technology investments and export of its surveillance
systems and other technologies as a major “threat” to Americans’ “way of life.”
In addition, many of the steps for the implementation of
such a program in the U.S., as laid out in this newly available document, are
currently being promoted and implemented as part of the government’s response
to the current coronavirus (COVID-19) crisis. This likely due to the fact that
many members of this same body have considerable overlap with the taskforces
and advisors currently guiding the government’s plans to “re-open the economy”
and efforts to use technology to respond to the current crisis.
The FOIA document, obtained by the Electronic Privacy
Information Center (EPIC), was produced by a little-known U.S. government
organization called the National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence
(NSCAI). It was created by the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA)
and its official purpose is “to consider the methods and means necessary to
advance the development of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning, and
associated technologies to comprehensively address the national security and
defense needs of the United States.”
The NSCAI is a key part of the government’s response to what
is often referred to as the coming “fourth industrial revolution,” which has
been described as “a revolution characterized by discontinuous technological
development in areas like artificial intelligence (AI), big data,
fifth-generation telecommunications networking (5G), nanotechnology and
biotechnology, robotics, the Internet of Things (IoT), and quantum computing.”
However, their main focus is ensuring that “the United
States … maintain a technological advantage in artificial intelligence, machine
learning, and other associated technologies related to national security and
defense.” The vice-chair of NSCAI, Robert Work – former Deputy Secretary of
Defense and senior fellow at the hawkish Center for a New American Security
(CNAS), described the commission’s purpose as determining “how the U.S.
national security apparatus should approach artificial intelligence, including
a focus on how the government can work with industry to compete with China’s
‘civil-military fusion’ concept.”
The recently released NSCAI document is a May 2019
presentation entitled “Chinese Tech Landscape Overview.” Throughout the
presentation, the NSCAI promotes the overhaul of the U.S. economy and way of
life as necessary for allowing the U.S. to ensure it holds a considerable
technological advantage over China, as losing this advantage is currently
deemed a major “national security” issue by the U.S. national security
apparatus. This concern about maintaining a technological advantage can be seen
in several other U.S. military documents and think tank reports, several of
which have warned that the U.S.’ technological advantage is quickly eroding.
The U.S. government and establishment media outlets often
blame alleged Chinese espionage or the Chinese government’s more explicit
partnerships with private technology companies in support of their claim that
the U.S. is losing this advantage over China. For instance, Chris Darby, the
current CEO of the CIA’s In-Q-Tel, who is also on the NSCAI, told CBS News last
year that China is the U.S.’ main competitor in terms of technology and that
U.S. privacy laws were hampering the U.S.’ capacity to counter China in this
regard, stating that:
"[D]ata is the new oil. And China is just awash with data.
And they don’t have the same restraints that we do around collecting it and
using it, because of the privacy difference between our countries. This notion
that they have the largest labeled data set in the world is going to be a huge
strength for them."
In another example, Michael Dempsey – former acting Director
of National Intelligence and currently a government-funded fellow at the
Council on Foreign Relations – argued in The Hill that:
"It’s quite clear, though, that China is determined to erase
our technological advantage, and is committing hundreds of billions of dollars
to this effort. In particular, China is determined to be a world leader in such
areas as artificial intelligence, high performance computing, and synthetic
biology. These are the industries that will shape life on the planet and the
military balance of power for the next several decades."
In fact, the national security apparatus of the United
States is so concerned about losing a technological edge over China that the
Pentagon recently decided to join forces directly with the U.S. intelligence
community in order “to get in front of Chinese advances in artificial
intelligence.” This union resulted in the creation of the Joint Artificial
Intelligence Center (JAIC), which ties together “the military’s efforts with
those of the Intelligence Community, allowing them to combine efforts in a
breakneck push to move government’s AI initiatives forward.” It also
coordinates with other government agencies, industry, academics, and U.S.
allies. Robert Work, who subsequently became the NSCAI vice-chair, said at the
time that JAIC’s creation was a “welcome first step in response to Chinese, and
to a lesser extent, Russian, plans to dominate these technologies.”
Similar concerns about “losing” technological advantage to
China have also been voiced by the NSCAI chairman, Eric Schmidt, the former
head of Alphabet – Google’s parent company, who argued in February in the New
York Times that Silicon Valley could soon lose “the technology wars” to China
if the U.S. government doesn’t take action. Thus, the three main groups
represented within the NSCAI – the intelligence community, the Pentagon and
Silicon Valley – all view China’s advancements in AI as a major national
security threat (and in Silicon Valley’s case, threat to their bottom lines and
market shares) that must be tackled quickly.
Targeting China’s “adoption advantage”
In the May 2019 “Chinese Tech Landscape Overview”
presentation, the NSCAI discusses that, while the U.S. still leads in the
“creation” stage of AI and related technologies, it lags behind China in the
“adoption” stage due to “structural factors.” It says that “creation”, followed
by “adoption” and “iteration” are the three phases of the “life cycle of new
tech” and asserts that failing to dominate in the “adoption” stage will allow
China to “leapfrog” the U.S. and dominate AI for the foreseeable future.
The presentation also argues that, in order to “leapfrog”
competitors in emerging markets, what is needed is not “individual brilliance”
but instead specific “structural conditions that exist within certain markets.”
It cites several case studies where China is considered to be “leapfrogging”
the U.S. due to major differences in these “structural factors.” Thus, the
insinuation of the document (though not directly stated) is that the U.S. must
alter the “structural factors” that are currently responsible for its lagging
behind China in the “adoption” phase of AI-driven technologies.
Chief among the troublesome “structural factors” highlighted
in this presentation are so-called “legacy systems” that are common in the U.S.
but much less so in China. The NSCAI document states that examples of “legacy
systems” include a financial system that still utilizes cash and card payments,
individual car ownership and even receiving medical attention from a human
doctor. It states that, while these “legacy systems” in the US are “good
enough,” too many “good enough” systems “hinder the adoption of new things,”
specifically AI-driven systems.
Another structural factor deemed by the NSCAI to be an
obstacle to the U.S.’ ability to maintain a technological advantage over China
is the “scale of the consumer market,” arguing that “extreme urban density =
on-demand service adoption.” In other words, extreme urbanization results in more
people using online or mobile-based “on-demand” services, ranging from
ride-sharing to online shopping. It also cites the use of mass surveillance on
China’s “huge population base” is an example of how China’s “scale of consumer
market” advantage allowing “China to leap ahead” in the fields of related
technologies, like facial recognition.
In addition to the alleged shortcomings of the U.S.’ “legacy
systems” and lack of “extreme urban density,” the NSCAI also calls for more
“explicit government support and involvement” as a means to speed up the
adoption of these systems in the U.S. This includes the government lending its
stores of data on civilians to train AI, specifically citing facial recognition
databases, and mandating that cities be “re-architected around AVs [autonomous
vehicles],” among others. Other examples given include the government investing
large amounts of money in AI start-ups and adding tech behemoths to a national,
public-private AI taskforce focused on smart city-implementation (among other
things).
With regards to the latter, the document says “this level of
public-private cooperation” in China is “outwardly embraced” by the parties
involved, with this “serving as a stark contrast to the controversy around
Silicon Valley selling to the U.S. government.” Examples of such controversy,
from the NSCAI’s perspective, likely include Google employees petitioning to
end the Google-Pentagon “Project Maven,” which uses Google’s AI software to
analyze footage captured by drones. Google eventually chose not to renew its
Maven contract as a result of the controversy, even though top Google
executives viewed the project as a “golden opportunity” to collaborate more
closely with the military and intelligence communities.
The document also defines another aspect of government
support as the “clearing of regulatory barriers.” This term is used in the
document specifically with respect to U.S. privacy laws, despite the fact that
the U.S. national security state has long violated these laws with near
complete impunity. However, the document seems to suggest that privacy laws in
the U.S. should be altered so that what the U.S. government has done “in
secret” with private citizen data can be done more openly and more extensively.
The NSCAI document also discusses the removal of “regulatory barriers” in order
to speed up the adoption of self-driving cars, even though autonomous driving
technology has resulted in several deadly and horrific car accidents and
presents other safety concerns.
Also discussed is how China’s “adoption advantage” will
“allow it to leapfrog the U.S.” in several new fields, including “AI medical
diagnosis” and “smart cities.” It then asserts that “the future will be decided
at the intersection of private enterprise and policy leaders between China and
the U.S.” If this coordination over the global AI market does not occur, the
document warns that “we [the U.S.] risk being left out of the discussions where
norms around AI are set for the rest of our lifetimes.”
The presentation also dwells considerably on how “the main
battleground [in technology] are not the domestic Chinese and US markets,” but
what it refers to as the NBU (next billion users) markets, where it states that
“Chinese players will aggressively challenge Silicon Valley.” In order to
challenge them more successfully, the presentation argues that, “just like we
[view] the market of teenagers as a harbinger for new trends, we should look at
China.”
The document also expresses concerns about China exporting
AI more extensively and intensively than the U.S., saying that China is
“already crossing borders” by helping to build facial databases in Zimbabwe and
selling image recognition and smart city systems to Malaysia. If allowed to
become “the unambiguous leader in AI,” it says that “China could end up writing
much of the rulebook of international norms around the deployment of AI” and
that it would “broaden China’s sphere of influence amongst an international
community that increasingly looks to the pragmatic authoritarianism of China
and Singapore as an alternative to Western liberal democracy.”
What will replace America’s “legacy systems”?
Given that the document makes it quite clear that “legacy
systems” in the U.S. are impeding its ability to prevent China from
“leapfrogging” ahead in AI and then dominating it for the foreseeable future,
it is also important to examine what the document suggests should replace these
“legacy systems” in the U.S.
As previously mentioned, one “legacy system” cited early on
in the presentation is the main means of payment for most Americans, cash and
credit/debit cards. The presentation asserts, in contrast to these “legacy
systems” that the best and most advanced system is moving entirely to
smartphone-based digital wallets.
It notes specifically the main mobile wallet provider in
India, PayTM, is majority owned by Chinese companies. It quotes an article,
which states that “a big break came [in 2016] when India canceled 86% of
currency in circulation in an effort to cut corruption and bring more people
into the tax net by forcing them to use less cash.” At the time, claims that
India’s 2016 “currency reform” would be used as a stepping stone towards a
cashless society were dismissed by some as “conspiracy theory.” However, last
year, a committee convened by India’s central bank (and led by an Indian tech
oligarch who also created India’s massive civilian biometric database) resulted
in the Indian government’s “Cashless India” program.
Regarding India’s 2016 “currency reform,” the NSCAI document
then asserts that “this would be unfathomable in the West. And unsurprisingly,
when 86% of the cash got cancelled and nobody had a credit card, mobile wallets
in India exploded, laying the groundwork for a far more advanced payments
ecosystem in India than the US.” However, it has become increasingly less
unfathomable in light of the current coronavirus crisis, which has seen efforts
to reduce the amount of cash used because paper bills may carry the virus as
well as efforts to introduce a Federal Reserve-backed “digital dollar.”
In addition, the NSCAI document from last May calls for the
end of in-person shopping and promotes moving towards all shopping being
performed online. It argues that “American companies have a lot to gain by
adopting ideas from Chinese companies” by shifting towards exclusive e-commerce
purchasing options. It states that only shopping online provides a “great
experience” and also adds that “when buying online is literally the only way to
get what you want, consumers go online.”
Another “legacy system” that the NSCAI seeks to overhaul is
car ownership, as it promotes autonomous, or self-driving vehicles and further
asserts that “fleet ownership > individual ownership.” It specifically
points to a need for “a centralized ride-sharing network,” which it says “is
needed to coordinate cars to achieve near 100% utilization rates.” However, it
warns against ride-sharing networks that “need a human operator paired with
each vehicle” and also asserts that “fleet ownership makes more sense” than
individual car ownership. It also specifically calls for these fleets to not
only be composed of self-driving cars, but electric cars and cites reports that
China “has the world’s most aggressive electric vehicle goals….and seek[s] the
lead in an emerging industry.”
The document states that China leads in ride-sharing today
even though ride-sharing was pioneered first in the U.S. It asserts once again
that the U.S. “legacy system” of individual car ownership and lack of “extreme
urban density” are responsible for China’s dominance in this area. It also
predicts that China will “achieve mass autonomous [vehicle] adoption before the
U.S.,” largely because “the lack of mass car ownership [in China] leads to far
more consumer receptiveness to AVs [autonomous vehicles].” It then notes that
“earlier mass adoption leads to a virtuous cycle that allows Chinese core
self-driving tech to accelerate beyond [its] Western counterparts.”
In addition to their vision for a future financial system
and future self-driving transport system, the NSCAI has a similarly dystopian
vision for surveillance. The document calls mass surveillance “one of the
‘first-and-best customers’ for AI” and “a killer application for deep
learning.” It also states that “having streets carpeted with cameras is good
infrastructure.”
It then discusses how “an entire generation of AI unicorn”
companies are “collecting the bulk of their early revenue from government
security contracts” and praises the use of AI in facilitating policing
activities. For instance, it lauds reports that “police are making convictions
based on phone calls monitored with iFlyTek’s voice-recognition technology” and
that “police departments are using [AI] facial recognition tech to assist in
everything from catching traffic law violators to resolving murder cases.”
On the point of facial recognition technology specifically,
the NSCAI document asserts that China has “leapt ahead” of the US on facial
recognition, even though “breakthroughs in using machine learning for image
recognition initially occurred in the US.” It claims that China’s advantage in
this instance is because they have government-implemented mass surveillance
(“clearing of regulatory barriers”), enormous government-provided stores of
data (“explicit government support”) combined with private sector databases on
a huge population base (“scale of consumer market”). As a consequence of this,
the NSCAI argues, China is also set to leap ahead of the U.S. in both
image/facial recognition and biometrics.
The document also points to another glaring difference
between the U.S. and its rival, stating that: “In the press and politics of
America and Europe, Al is painted as something to be feared that is eroding
privacy and stealing jobs. Conversely, China views it as both a tool for
solving major macroeconomic challenges in order to sustain their economic
miracle, and an opportunity to take technological leadership on the global
stage.”
The NSCAI document also touches on the area of healthcare,
calling for the implementation of a system that seems to be becoming reality
thanks to the current coronavirus crisis. In discussing the use of AI in
healthcare (almost a year before the current crisis began), it states that
“China could lead the world in this sector” and “this could lead to them
exporting their tech and setting international norms.” One reason for this is
also that China has “far too few doctors for the population” and calls having
enough doctors for in-person visits a “legacy system.” It also cited U.S.
regulatory measures such as “HIPPA compliance and FDA approval” as obstacles
that don’t constrain Chinese authorities.
More troubling, it argues that “the potential impact of
government supplied data is even more significant in biology and healthcare,”
and says it is likely that “the Chinese government [will] require every single
citizen to have their DNA sequenced and stored in government databases,
something nearly impossible to imagine in places as privacy conscious as the
U.S. and Europe.” It continues by saying that “the Chinese apparatus is
well-equipped to take advantage” and calls these civilian DNA databases a “logical
next step.”
Who are the NSCAI?
Given the sweeping changes to the U.S. that the NSCAI
promoted in this presentation last May, it becomes important to examine who
makes up the commission and to consider their influence over U.S. policy on
these matters, particularly during the current crisis. As previously mentioned,
the chairman of the NSCAI is Eric Schmidt, the former head of Alphabet
(Google’s parent company) who has also invested heavily in Israeli
intelligence-linked tech companies including the controversial start-up
“incubator” Team8. In addition, the committee’s vice-chair is Robert Work, is
not only a former top Pentagon official, but is currently working with the
think tank CNAS, which is run by John McCain’s long-time foreign policy adviser
and Joe Biden’s former national security adviser.
Other members of the NSCAI are as follows:
Safra Catz, CEO of Oracle, with close ties to Trump’s top
donor Sheldon Adelson
Steve Chien, supervisor of the Artificial Intelligence Group
at Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Lab
Mignon Clyburn, Open Society Foundation fellow and former
FCC commissioner
Chris Darby, CEO of In-Q-Tel (CIA’s venture capital arm)
Ken Ford, CEO of the Florida Institute for Human and Machine
Cognition
Jose-Marie Griffiths, president of Dakota State University
and former National Science Board member
Eric Horvitz, director of Microsoft Research Labs
Andy Jassy, CEO of Amazon Web Services (CIA contractor)
Gilman Louie, partner at Alsop Louie Partners and former CEO
of In-Q-Tel
William Mark, director of SRI International and former
Lockheed Martin director
Jason Matheny, director of the Center for Security and
Emerging Technology, former Assistant director of National Intelligence and
former director of IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Project Agency)
Katharina McFarland, consultant at Cypress International and
former Assistant Secretary of Defense for Acquisition
Andrew Moore, head of Google Cloud AI
As can be seen in the list above, there is a considerable
amount of overlap between the NSCAI and the companies currently advising the
White House on “re-opening” the economy (Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Lockheed
Martin, Oracle) and one NSCAI member, Oracle’s Safra Katz, is on the White House’s
“economic revival” taskforce. Also, there is also overlap between the NSCAI and
the companies that are intimately involved in the implementation of the
“contact tracing” “coronavirus surveillance system,” a mass surveillance system
promoted by the Jared Kushner-led, private-sector coronavirus task force. That
surveillance system is set to be constructed by companies with deep ties to
Google and the U.S. national security state, and both Google and Apple, who
create the operating systems for the vast majority of smartphones used in the
U.S., have said they will now build that surveillance system directly into
their smartphone operating systems.
Also notable is the fact that In-Q-Tel and the U.S.
intelligence community has considerable representation on the NSCAI and that
they also boast close ties with Google, Palantir and other Silicon Valley
giants, having been early investors in those companies. Both Google and
Palantir, as well as Amazon (also on the NSCAI) are also major contractors for
U.S. intelligence agencies. In-Q-Tel’s involvement on the NSCAI is also
significant because they have been heavily promoting mass surveillance of
consumer electronic devices for use in pandemics for the past several years.
Much of that push has come from In-Q-Tel’s current Executive Vice President
Tara O’Toole, who was previously the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for
Health Security and also co-authored several controversial biowarfare/pandemic
simulations, such as Dark Winter.
In addition, since at least January, the U.S. intelligence
community and the Pentagon have been at the forefront of developing the U.S.
government’s still-classified “9/11-style” response plans for the coronavirus
crisis, alongside the National Security Council. Few news organizations have noted
that these classified response plans, which are set to be triggered if and when
the U.S. reaches a certain number of coronavirus cases, has been created
largely by elements of the national security state (i.e. the NSC, Pentagon, and
intelligence), as opposed to civilian agencies or those focused on public
health issues.
Furthermore, it has been reported that the U.S. intelligence
community as well as U.S. military intelligence knew by at least January
(though recent reports have said as early as last November) that the
coronavirus crisis would reach “pandemic proportions” by March. The American
public were not warned, but elite members of the business and political classes
were apparently informed, given the record numbers of CEO resignations in January
and several high-profile insider trading allegations that preceded the current
crisis by a matter of weeks.
Perhaps even more disconcerting is the added fact that the
U.S. government not only participated in the eerily prescient pandemic
simulation last October known as Event 201, it also led a series of pandemic
response simulations last year. Crimson Contagion was a series of four
simulations that involved 19 U.S. federal agencies, including intelligence and
the military, as well as 12 different states and a host of private sector
companies that simulated a devastating pandemic influenza outbreak that had
originated in China. It was led by the current HHS Assistant Secretary for
Preparedness and Response, Robert Kadlec, who is a former lobbyist for military
and intelligence contractors and a Bush-era homeland security “bioterrorism”
advisor.
In addition, both Kadlec and the Johns Hopkins Center for
Health Security, which was intimately involved in Event 201, have direct ties
to the controversial June 2001 biowarfare exercise “Dark Winter,” which
predicted the 2001 anthrax attacks that transpired just months later in
disturbing ways. Though efforts by media and government were made to blame the
anthrax attacks on a foreign source, the anthrax was later found to have
originated at a U.S. bioweapons lab and the FBI investigation into the case has
been widely regarded as a cover-up, including by the FBI’s once-lead
investigator on that case.
Given the above, it is worth asking if those who share the
NSCAI’s vision saw the coronavirus pandemic early on as an opportunity to make
the “structural changes” it had deemed essential to countering China’s lead in
the mass adoption of AI-driven technologies, especially considering that many
of the changes in the May 2019 document are now quickly taking place under the
guise of combatting the coronavirus crisis.
The NSCAI vision takes shape
Though the May 2019 NSCAI document was authored nearly a
year ago, the coronavirus crisis has resulted in the implementation of many of
the changes and the removal of many of the “structural” obstacles that the
commission argued needed to be drastically altered in order to ensure a
technological advantage over China in the field of AI. The aforementioned move
away from cash, which is taking place not just in the U.S. but internationally,
is just one example of many.
For instance, earlier this week CNN reported that grocery
stores are now considering banning in-person shopping and that the U.S.
Department of Labor has recommended that retailers nationwide start “‘using a
drive-through window or offering curbside pick-up’ to protect workers for
exposure to coronavirus.” In addition, last week, the state of Florida approved
an online-purchase plan for low income families using the Supplemental
Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP). Other reports have argued that social
distancing inside grocery stores is ineffective and endangering people’s lives.
As previously mentioned, the May 2019 NSCAI document argues that moving away
from in-person shopping is necessary to mitigate China’s “adoption advantage”
and also argued that “when buying online is literally the only way to get what
you want, consumers go online.”
Reports have also argued that these changes in shopping will
last far beyond coronavirus, such as an article by Business Insider entitled
“The coronavirus pandemic is pushing more people online and will forever change
how Americans shop for groceries, experts say.” Those cited in the piece argue
that this shift away from in-person shopping will be “permanent” and also
states that “More people are trying these services than otherwise would have
without this catalyst and gives online players a greater chance to acquire and
keep a new customer base.” A similar article in Yahoo! News argues that, thanks
to the current crisis, “our dependence on online shopping will only rise because
no one wants to catch a virus at a shop.”
In addition, the push towards the mass use of self-driving
cars has also gotten a boost thanks to coronavirus, with driverless cars now
making on-demand deliveries in California. Two companies, one Chinese-owned and
the other backed by Japan’s SoftBank, have since been approved to have their
self-driving cars used on California roads and that approval was expedited due
to the coronavirus crisis. The CPO of Nuro Inc., the SoftBank-backed company,
was quoted in Bloomberg as saying that “The Covid-19 pandemic has expedited the
public need for contactless delivery services. Our R2 fleet is custom-designed
to change the very nature of driving and the movement of goods by allowing
people to remain safely at home while their groceries, medicines, and packages
are brought to them.” Notably, the May 2019 NSCAI document references the
inter-connected web of SoftBank-backed companies, particularly those backed by
its largely Saudi-funded “Vision Fund,” as forming “the connective tissue for a
global federation of tech companies” set to dominate AI.
California isn’t the only state to start using self-driving
cars, as the Mayo Clinic of Florida is now also using them. “Using artificial
intelligence enables us to protect staff from exposure to this contagious virus
by using cutting-edge autonomous vehicle technology and frees up staff time
that can be dedicated to direct treatment and care for patients,” Kent Thielen,
M.D., CEO of Mayo Clinic in Florida stated in a recent press release cited by
Mic.
Like the changes to in-person shopping in the age of
coronavirus, other reports assert that self-driving vehicles are here to stay.
One report published by Mashable is entitled “It took a coronavirus outbreak
for self-driving cars to become more appealing,” and opens by stating
“Suddenly, a future full of self-driving cars isn’t just a sci-fi pipe dream.
What used to be considered a scary, uncertain technology for many Americans
looks more like an effective tool to protect ourselves from a fast-spreading,
infectious disease.” It further argues that this is hardly a “fleeting shift”
in driving habits and one tech CEO cited in the piece, Anuja Sonalker of Steer
Tech, claims that “There has been a distinct warming up to human-less, contactless
technology. Humans are biohazards, machines are not.”
Another focus of the NSCAI presentation, AI medicine, has
also seen its star rise in recent weeks. For instance, several reports have
touted how AI-driven drug discovery platforms have been able to identify
potential treatments for coronavirus. Microsoft, whose research lab director is
on the NSCAI, recently put $20 million into its “AI for health” program to
speed up the use of AI in analyzing coronavirus data. In addition,
“telemedicine”– a form of remote medical care – has also become widely adopted
due to the coronavirus crisis.
Several other AI-driven technologies have similarly become
more widely adopted thanks to coronavirus, including the use of mass
surveillance for “contact tracing” as well as facial recognition technology and
biometrics. A recent Wall Street Journal report stated that the government is
seriously considering both contact tracing via phone geolocation data and
facial recognition technology in order to track those who might have
coronavirus. In addition, private businesses – like grocery stores and
restaurants – are using sensors and facial recognition to see how many people
and which people are entering their stores.
As far as biometrics go, university researchers are now working
to determine if “smartphones and biometric wearables already contain the data
we need to know if we have become infected with the novel coronavirus.” Those
efforts seek to detect coronavirus infections early by analyzing “sleep
schedules, oxygen levels, activity levels and heart rate” based on smartphone
apps like FitBit and smartwatches. In countries outside the U.S., biometric IDs
are being touted as a way to track those who have and lack immunity to
coronavirus.
In addition, one report in The Edge argued that the current
crisis is changing what types of biometrics should be used, asserting that a
shift towards thermal scanning and facial recognition is necessary:
"At this critical juncture of the crisis, any integrated
facial recognition and thermal scanning solution must be implemented easily,
rapidly and in a cost-effective manner. Workers returning to offices or
factories must not have to scramble to learn a new process or fumble with
declaration forms. They must feel safe and healthy for them to work
productively. They just have to look at the camera and smile. Cameras and
thermal scanners, supported by a cloud-based solution and the appropriate
software protocols, will do the rest."
Also benefiting from the coronavirus crisis is the concept
of “smart cities,” with Forbes recently writing that “Smart cities can help us
combat the coronavirus pandemic.” That article states that “Governments and
local authorities are using smart city technology, sensors and data to trace
the contacts of people infected with the coronavirus. At the same time, smart
cities are also helping in efforts to determine whether social distancing rules
are being followed.”
That article in Forbes also contains the following passage:
"…[T]he use of masses of connected sensors makes it clear
that the coronavirus pandemic is–intentionally or not–being used as a testbed
for new surveillance technologies that may threaten privacy and civil
liberties. So aside from being a global health crisis, the coronavirus has
effectively become an experiment in how to monitor and control people at
scale."
Another report in The Guardian states that “If one of the
government takeaways from coronavirus is that ‘smart cities’ including Songdo
or Shenzhen are safer cities from a public health perspective, then we can
expect greater efforts to digitally capture and record our behaviour in urban
areas – and fiercer debates over the power such surveillance hands to
corporations and states.” There have also been reports that assert that typical
cities are “woefully unprepared” to face pandemics compared to “smart cities.”
Yet, beyond many of the NSCAI’s specific concerns regarding
mass AI adoption being conveniently resolved by the current crisis, there has
also been a concerted effort to change the public’s perception of AI in
general. As previously mentioned, the NSCAI had pointed out last year that:
"In the press and politics of America and Europe, Al is
painted as something to be feared that is eroding privacy and stealing jobs.
Conversely, China views it as both a tool for solving major macroeconomic
challenges in order to sustain their economic miracle, and an opportunity to
take technological leadership on the global stage."
Now, less than a year later, the coronavirus crisis has
helped spawn a slew of headlines in just the last few weeks that paint AI very
differently, including “How Artificial Intelligence Can Help Fight
Coronavirus,” “How AI May Prevent the Next Coronavirus Outbreak,” “AI Becomes
an Ally in the Fight Against COVID-19,” “Coronavirus: AI steps up in battle
against COVID-19,” and “Here’s How AI Can Help Africa Fight the Coronavirus,”
among numerous others.
It is indeed striking how the coronavirus crisis has
seemingly fulfilled the NSCAI’s entire wishlist and removed many of the
obstacles to the mass adoption of AI technologies in the United States. Like
major crises of the past, the national security state appears to be using the
chaos and fear to promote and implement initiatives that would be normally
rejected by Americans and, if history is any indicator, these new changes will
remain long after the coronavirus crisis fades from the news cycle. It is
essential that these so-called “solutions” be recognized for what they are and
that we consider what type of world they will end up creating – an
authoritarian technocracy. We ignore the rapid advance of these NSCAI-promoted
initiatives and the phasing out of so-called “legacy systems” (and with them,
many long-cherished freedoms) at our own peril.
Whitney Webb is a MintPress News contributing journalist based in Chile. She has contributed to several independent media outlets including Global Research, EcoWatch, the Ron Paul Institute and 21st Century Wire, among others. She has made several radio and television appearances and is the 2019 winner of the Serena Shim Award for Uncompromised Integrity in Journalism.
